1. Breaking Windows in “Fear City”
“I’m seein’ body after body and our Mayor Giuliani
Ain’t tryin’ to see no black man turn to John Gotti.”
– Everyday Struggle, The Notorious B.I.G., 1994.
When Biggie rapped these words in 1994 on his song Everyday Struggle, Rudy Giuliani was just entering office as Mayor of New York City. Riding a colossal wave of support behind his promises to revolutionize policing, Giuliani exacted revenge on the criminals who had turned the Big Apple into one of the most dangerous cities throughout the 1970s and 80s. Along with Police Commissioner William Bratton, Giuliani authorized the NYPD to use force in dealing with petty crimes such as turnstile-hopping, graffiti, and selling loose cigarettes. He expanded the NYPD’s Street Crime Unit by nearly triple its size, allowing a greater proportion of plainclothes units to patrol high crime areas and perform sting operations. Before it was disbanded in June 2020, the Street Crime Unit accounted for 2 percent of the NYPD’s force, and yet committed about a third of fatal police shootings since 2000.
Under their reign, violent crime in New York City dropped by more than 56 percent, and misdemeanor arrests surged by 70 percent, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. In a 2015 report, Bratton wrote that the increase in misdemeanor arrests led to fewer felonies, because the NYPD was preventing crime more effectively. “Arresting someone for a misdemeanor frequently prevents him from graduating to committing felonies, for which severe sanctions like prison may result,” wrote Bratton.
Giuliani and Bratton were disciples of the “broken windows theory” set forth by James Wilson and George Kelling in a 1982 article published in The Atlantic. In it, Wilson and Kelling argued that neighborhoods with a high number of petty crimes were vulnerable to more serious ones. In areas where acts of vandalism were left unchecked, the risk of theft and murder increased.
According to the article, the solution was to address the small problems when they were still small, in order to prevent any potential escalation of crime. The metaphor Wilson and Kelling utilized to describe this phenomenon was that a building with a bunch of broken, unrepaired windows is more likely to be vandalized than a building that quickly repairs its windows. Here, the windows represent crime, and the building represents a community. Naturally, if a building has a ton of broken windows, one of its landlords should be responsible for patching them up. But what was the most optimal way to protect these communities from any further harm? And who exactly did Wilson and Kelling consider to be the landlords of these proverbial buildings?
The primary experiment that inspired the “Broken Windows” article was performed by Kelling himself and was published in 1981. Termed the “Newark Foot Patrol Experiment,” Kelling walked around Newark, New Jersey, alongside a foot patrol officer named Kelly. The goal of the experiment, according to Kelling, was “to see how they defined ‘order’ and what they did to maintain it.”
As Kelling walked alongside Kelly, he noticed that while frequent stops were made to enforce basic street laws such as loitering and public drinking, equal time was spent engaging in conversation with the “regulars,” or familiar local faces. There seemed to be a symbiotic relationship between officers and the community, where someone such as Kelly would show up to patrol the streets, and the “regulars” would show him friendly support. “The people of Newark, to judge from their behavior and their remarks to interviewers, apparently assign a high value to public order, and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order,” wrote Kelling and Wilson in the “Broken Windows” article.
“Our experience is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer,” wrote Wilson and Kelling. “Such exchanges give them a sense of importance, provide them with the basis for gossip, and allow them to explain to the authorities what is worrying them.” While Kelly’s primary objective was to take appropriate action and prevent crime, he also acted as a walking public forum for citizens, taking note of their concerns and gaining their trust.
However, according to both scientists, a newfound problem had emerged. Due to a national crime wave, originating from the urban riots of the 1960s and 1970s, policemen started to operate as crime solvers, with their priorities being rooted in solving crimes, gathering evidence, and making arrests. From their perspective, many departments were straying from the essence of policing: maintaining order in their communities and preventing crime from occurring.
In the Atlantic article, Wilson and Kelling advocated for police departments to return to their original duty as crime preventers in communities. “The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself,” concluded Wilson and Kelling. “The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control.” They hoped that police presence would be more concentrated in urban, higher-crime areas, in order to ensure the prevention of crime and disorderliness, rather than the pursuit of criminals.
But they offered a stark warning: the questions posed in the article had no simple answer. In fact, Wilson and Kelling were upfront about the concerns they had regarding the discrimination their theory could morph into.
“We might agree that certain behavior makes one person more undesirable than another but how do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable?” questioned Wilson and Kelling. “How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?”
It was just over ten years later where Wilson and Kelling received an answer. Giuliani was elected mayor of New York City in 1993, and he immediately put forth a plan to reduce the overall crime rate in a city reeling from an era defined by misconduct and delinquency.
During the 1970s and 1980s, New York City experienced a colossal tidal wave of crime related to the crack epidemic. In 1975, the police and fire department unions, under the Council for Public Safety, posted pamphlets in subway cars and construction sites for tourists with instructions on how to avoid being a target of crime. The pamphlets, titled “Welcome to Fear City,” featured an image of the Grim Reaper on the cover and a sub header describing the pamphlet as “A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York.”
The wave reached its peak in 1990, when the city suffered a record high number of homicides, with 2,262 according to the NYPD. David Dinkins, the mayor of New York City at the time, was called out by the New York Post which chose to plaster Dinkins’ face across the front page of their September 7, 1990 edition with the headline “Dave, Do Something!”
Dave did in fact do something. He petitioned for and received enough funding from the State Legislature to expand the number of NYPD policemen by 25 percent through his “Safe Streets, Safe City” plan. In 1991, he founded the Beacon program, consisting of after-school programs at community centers that kept many pre-teen and teenage students out of trouble.
With these initiatives in place, crime began to gradually decrease across the board in New York City. After reaching its all-time high in 1990, the number of violent crimes decreased by ten percent by 1993. Unfortunately for Dinkins, he narrowly lost the 1993 mayoral election to Giuliani by three percentage points.
Much of the crime reduction in New York City throughout the 1990s was attributed to Giuliani and his “broken windows” mantra. During his mayoral campaign, Giuliani depicted Dinkins as incapable of controlling the levels of crime, when in fact crime was already decreasing under Dinkins.
Dinkins was the target of a riot in 1992, where thousands of off-duty police officers and their supporters swarmed City Hall in protest of Dinkins’ proposal to create a civilian agency with the purpose of investigating police misconduct. In one of the most infamous riots ever seen in New York City, rioters blocked off traffic to and from the Brooklyn Bridge, stormed into City Hall, and destroyed thousands of dollars in private property. The majority of rioters were NYPD officers who drank alcohol and hurled racial epithets at bystanders. In the middle of it was Giuliani, who, according to the New York Times, “led the crowd in chants, using an obscenity to refer to Dinkins’ administration policies,” although the following sentence noted that the crowd had reacted less warmly to Giuliani’s statement that the NYPD needed to fight corruption within the police department. Either way, Giuliani won the mayoral race of 1993, and it was full steam ahead from there.
The conventional wisdom was that broken windows had made New York safer. So it wasn’t surprising that Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani’s successor, took the theory a step further in 2002, when he introduced the “stop-and-frisk” policy. This allowed policemen to detain anyone on the street they deemed suspicious and pat them down if they looked to have a weapon. The results of the policy were exactly what Wilson and Kelling predicted in their 1982 Atlantic article. Policemen began to racially profile minorities and detain Black and Latinx people at a disproportionately high rate compared to white people. According to the New York Times, 90 percent of the NYPD’s five million stops made during Mayor Bloomberg’s three terms involved Black and Latinx residents.
On August 12, 2013, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that stop-and-frisk violated the constitutional rights of minorities. In Floyd v. City of New York, she argued that New York City and the NYPD “adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling by targeting racially defined groups for stops based on local crime suspect data,” which resulted in widespread racial profiling. She mandated the use of body-worn cameras for some officers and ordered the creation of community meetings by a court-appointed facilitator, giving residents the opportunity to voice their opinions on the police.
Bloomberg accused Judge Scheindlin of “deliberately denying the city ‘a fair trial.’” He stated that none of the NYPD’s tactics would be changed quickly, and promised to file an appeal.
Scheindlin’s ruling drastically decreased the number of stops made and derailed the use of stop-and-frisk in New York City. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, NYC went from 685,724 stops in 201l to 12,459 stops in 2018.
But the damage was already done.
Stop-and-frisk policing was arguably the cause of Amadou Diallo’s death, a Guinean immigrant who in 1999 was shot forty-one times after pulling out his wallet by plainclothes officers who were part of the Street Crime Unit championed by Giuliani. It was certainly the cause of Eric Garner’s death in 2014, seeing that he was murdered by an officer performing a prohibitive chokehold, just for selling individual cigarettes from packs without tax stamps.
During the 2020 presidential debates, then-candidate Michael Bloomberg was pressed for his adherence to the stop-and-frisk policy during his mayorship. While Bloomberg apologized for his past actions, others were quick to suggest that he was currying political favor and had staunchly defended the practice years after he exited office.
The evolution of broken windows policing into stop-and-frisk tactics is not what George Kelling intended. In his later years, Kelling made sure to differentiate between his broken-windows theory and what it ultimately morphed into. Before his death in 2019, Kelling co-authored a piece with former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton in City Journal, where he defended his legacy, including the benefits of broken-windows policing.
“Unlike SQF (stop, question, and frisk), Broken Windows policing is not a tactical response based on reasonable suspicion of possible criminality,” wrote Kelling and Bratton. “Rather, it is a more broadly-based policy mandating that police will address disorderly illegal behavior, such as public drinking and drug use, fights, public urination, and other acts considered to be minor offenses, with responses ranging from warning and referral to summons and arrest.”
Kelling further noted that African Americans and Hispanics, the very people who suffered from the unintended consequences of the theory, supported the policy by nearly a three-to-one rate, according to a Quinnipiac University poll about broken-windows policing. He interpreted the results as underlying public support from all races for this kind of enforcement.
Kelling and Wilson are ultimately held responsible for the over-policing of minority communities. What had started as an idealistic vision to decrease crime ended up mutating into an unrecognizable and twisted method of policing, egged on by figures such as Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. For Kelling and Wilson, their legacies are cemented by the broken-windows theory, which is either responsible for exponentially reducing crime in urban areas or enabling the police to discriminate against African American and Latinx communities, depending on who is asked.
2. Community Policing
Dalton Price patrolled the streets of Paterson, NJ for 25 years. The 56-year-old retired officer is now the Interim Security Coordinator of the Paterson Public School District, but he continues to advocate for community policing nationwide.
Within the Paterson Police Department, Price served with the Anti-Crime unit, Street Crime unit, Gang Enforcement Unit, and a myriad of other positions. He supervised the “Operation Impact Unit,” which according to Price, was created to “place officers in certain at-risk communities and find out what their concerns were.”
“As basic as I can put it, community policing is you, the community, helping me, the police officer, to help you, the community,” Price explains to me over a Zoom call. He conceives of policing as a two-way process, like opening a door in order to pass information back and forth between people in two adjacent rooms. “Now, we have to find out how to get that door open. You tell me what you need from me, and I give you what you need. However, the communication part is the issue, and if that door’s not open, it’s a huge issue.”
In 2017, Price authored The Guide to Community Policing 3.0, a handbook written for police officers and departments. The book’s subtitle is “rejuvenating today’s most fragile and important relationship.” One of the programs he describes is Stop, Park, and Talk (SPT), which entails exactly what its name suggests. Officers get out of their cars and engage in open communication with anyone wanting to talk with them. Other programs include youth outreach at camps and schools, and local safety programs.
To Price, community policing isn’t just walking around talking to citizens; it’s an entire philosophy, one that Price argues needs to be implemented from top to bottom within police departments. The bottom line is that all policing should be community policing. The problem is that officers don’t think community policing applies to them.
“I’ve heard stories where officers are approached by teachers who say, ‘I’m wondering if someone can come in and talk to the kids at my school,’” says Price, with a hint of frustration. “And the officer says, ‘Here’s a phone number. Call so-and-so in the community policing division, and they’ll come out for you.’”
“All he has to do is talk to his sergeant, get clearance for the day, or for a couple of hours, and he can go do it. But why doesn’t the officer feel that way? Because there’s a community policing division, and they think they’re separate.”
Price also notes that officers tend to separate traditional policing duties from community policing, but that they never differentiate between a drug or traffic arrest and traditional policing. Officers consider making arrests to be real policing, not going to career days at local schools. However, even narcotics officers should be willing to engage in community policing when the time is right.
If an officer is in the midst of tracking down and apprehending a convicted drug dealer, of course they aren’t thinking of community policing. But all of a sudden, the drug dealer is being processed downtown at the local jail. All of a sudden, they start to cry. “A conversation starts, and they’re telling you how they got into this position,” hypothesizes Price. You give them suggestions, give them advice, and if I’m the officer, I’m willing to help them find a person to talk to, help them get in rehab, and that happens. He’s doing this to someone he just arrested, because it’s not personal. Can this situation carry over into community policing? Absolutely.”
A lot of Price’s frustration stems from the chiefs of police who don’t view community policing as a necessary component of their departments. “When you have departments where the chiefs understand the effectiveness of community policing and know what they need to get done, it gets done,” says Price. Chiefs who understand its importance will allocate more resources to community policing tactics and officers. Chiefs who don’t are dismissive of the practice.
Price envisions a world where all police officers engage in community policing in one way or another. If there’s a police department with 800 officers and 25 of them are assigned to the community policing force, all 800 officers should be able to do community policing in accordance with how Price describes it.
One challenge is that it is harder to quantify the effectiveness of community policing than it is for traditional policing, where arrests are the universal metric. A reduction of crime in a given area can be attributed to a number of causes, from legislation to increased surveillance. But are there any metrics that specifically show how community policing reduces crime?
“The benefits are very, very hard to measure,” admits Price. “No one knows that because of community policing, there were homicides that were getting solved, shootings getting resolved, all because of community policing, and there’s no real way to measure that.”
Rather, Price emphasizes that the inherent value found in community policing is the creation of a clear line of communication between the community and the police. Once officers open themselves up to dialogue, the rest is up to the people. After all, community policing is a two-way relationship that requires both parties to interact with one another. “My goal is ultimately to give you, the people, the opportunity to put my message out there and be an open forum for you. Once I do that, my job is done and it’s not in my hands. I hit my points, I’m open to conversation and any kind of dialogue.”
3. Rockford
The Rock River starts in Brandon, Wisconsin. It flows south towards the border of Wisconsin and Illinois, eventually crossing the border and continuing on its journey to Rock Island, Illinois. Along the way, it splits in half an Illinoisan city named Rockford, located an hour and a half drive west of Chicago.
Rockford was settled in 1834, and it developed into an industrial haven for workers due to its proximity to Chicago, as well as its location on the Rock River. For a while, Rockford was one of the largest furniture-manufacturing industries in the United States and produced inventions like electronic garage door openers and airbrushes. In the mid-20th century, it fell victim to the industrial decline of the Rust Belt in the mid-20th century despite efforts to revitalize the economy via the financial and healthcare industries.
One of Rockford’s local nicknames is “Glockford.” In 2019, it was named the 11th most dangerous city in the country. In 2018, USA Today ranked Rockford as the 16th worst city to live in, based on quality-of-life metrics.
Andrew Seale, 35, lives on the east side of Rockford, in a neighborhood in dire need of repaving. He is one of two Resident Officers for the Rockford Police Department as part of the ROCK House program, or the Resident Officer Community Keeper Houses. Established in 2017, the program’s aim is to cultivate relationships between police officers and the community. The hope is that residents will develop rapport with the officers, and vice versa. In exchange for living in the neighborhood he patrols, the program provides him with rent-free housing. The ROCK House program enables someone like Officer Seale to interact daily with the community and build relationships with his neighbors. It’s on him to make sure that trust stays intact.
Seale comes off as a personable guy. His presence is easy-going, and he speaks passionately about the work he’s done in the community as an officer. Make no mistake, though: Seale has seen things no person should have to bear witness to. In 2017, for example, he testified as an eyewitness to a quadruple homicide, where he found a 24-year-old man and a four-year-old boy on the floor, brutally gunned down. Seale’s still relatively young at 35, but having been on the force for 11 years, he’s already a grizzled veteran of the Rockford Police Department.
Seale divides his activities between “traditional” and community duties. He writes tickets, shows up at crime scenes, and apprehends criminals. But he also bases his schedule on the needs of the community and frequently engages with them.
What exactly do those exchanges look like? Seale remembers his first day as the newest ROCK House Resident Officer in November 2019. The first thing he did was go door-to-door introducing himself to his neighbors, surveying their experiences in the neighborhood and handing out backpacks to children. There’s a news clip online of this exact exchange, and in it, Seale’s neighbor says she feels safer with a police officer living next door, especially with a shooting having occurred down the block a week beforehand.
Seale played high school football in Bolingbrook, Illinois. His coach was a police officer and encouraged him to attend the “Explorers Program,” which gives high school students the chance to explore a career in law enforcement. He loved it so much that while he was attending Governors State University thirty miles south of Chicago, he tested with different local police departments, which is how he ended up in Rockford.
As a Resident Officer, Seale hopes to help local children the same way his high school coach did. When he moved into the neighborhood, he noticed that the kids loved playing soccer. He started organizing games for them so frequently that he ended up becoming their de facto coach. “You have kids from different countries and different areas of the city, and they all come together for the love of the game,” says Seale. “And some of these kids would never be dealing with each other otherwise.”
Seale understands that to the children, he’s still a police officer. But he emphasizes his ability to focus on coaching them rather than letting his job get in the way. “For those kids, it’s one of those things where they’ll see me, they’ll know me, and they’ll feel positively towards me,” says Seale. “I think when some of them get older, their interactions with me might make them want to become police officers as well.”
Prior to the pandemic, Seale and Officer Patrice Turner, his fellow Resident Officer, hosted multiple events in the span of a couple months. They organized a wellness fair for the homeless, where they made medical experts, housing programs, and even a barber available. Seale planned on partnering with a local elementary school to go from classroom-to-classroom and speak with the children; he even wanted to start a soccer program there. Most of this came to a halt when the pandemic struck, but Seale plans to start where he left off when it ends.
Part of the program’s purpose is logistical. If you’re going to assign a police officer to both patrol and live in a residential neighborhood, there better be a logistical benefit to it. “The ultimate goal is to create new partnerships with the community, so that if something happens in the neighborhood, considering the fact that we know people and they know us, they might be willing to come forward with some more information about whatever crimes occur,” says Seale.
He notes the connections he’s made in the community, especially with children. Prior to being named a Resident Officer, Seale served as a school resource officer, and he enjoys watching the children he serves grow up and mature into high school and college students.
Can ROCK Houses be implemented in larger cities such as New York and Detroit? Seale says it should be considered on a case-by-case basis. “For one, you have to consider the community, and how receptive they will be, because you don’t want to necessarily put an officer in danger,” says Seale. “I’m sure that somewhere in this country there is a community that would be completely against the idea, and so if you put an officer in a house and the whole community was against that idea, then it probably wouldn’t be the smartest or safest thing for the officer.”
He echoes the notion that it is quite possible for police officers to be nervous at the prospect of living within the community they police. Then, he proposes a theory.
“Even in larger cities, there are people in the community who know police officers, and maybe they have a good relationship with that police officer,” says Seale. “I don’t think you would get a lot of backlash.”
Naturally, Seale is biased. He knew he wanted to be a policeman since high school. To others, this idea of a resident vouching for an officer next door might seem outlandish.
Seale is aware of this, and he understands that there is a movement against the police. “We dealt with some protests over the summer, and other officers and I were targeted in some Facebook posts,” recalls Seale. “These people are angry about everything that’s going on, and if they choose for me to be their target, then let it be.”
4. Defunding the Police
To defund or not to defund the police. It is the discussion that has torn the United States in half this past year. In the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor murders in the spring of 2020, “Defund the Police” became a rallying cry in protests across the world, and the movement gained momentum as millions marched to protest police brutality.
Strictly speaking, defunding the police entails the reallocation of money from police departments to social services, such as youth services, housing, and mental healthcare services, especially in underserved communities. Law enforcement spending ranks as the second-largest spending category for local government budgets in the United States, only behind education. The theory is that if money is divested from police departments, the need for police officers decreases. In turn, investing that money into trusted and dependable community organizations more effectively addresses social issues.
Cities and their local governments have begun defunding police departments in accordance with the demands of activists. Last year, New York City agreed to cut nearly $1 billion from the NYPD’s $6 billion budget, with Mayor de Blasio promising to reinvest $115 million for summer youth programming, $116 million for education and $134 million for family and social services. San Francisco cut $120 million in police funding and redirected it to black communities.
Last November, residents of Los Angeles County approved Measure J, which requires that no less than 10 percent of the county’s local funding address racial justice by investing in community initiatives like youth programs, housing, and small business development. The measure explicitly noted that the funds “not be used for any carceral system or law enforcement agencies.”
Despite these gestures, there is evidence that other cities are actually increasing their police budgets. According to Bloomberg, more than half of the United States’ 50 largest cities increased their law enforcement budgets in the past year. Tampa’s was increased by 8.6 percent, while Atlanta’s went up by 4.6 percent. Other cities that saw either no change or an increase in their police budgets include San Diego, Miami, and Oakland.
In Tampa, the police department’s budget increased by $13 million. While the bulk of the increase focused on handling pension, salary, and other contractual agreements, the fact that the budget saw even a penny go towards policing angered local activists, who pleaded with the Tampa City Council to defund the Tampa police. Similarly, San Diego’s city council voted almost unanimously to increase police funding by $27 million to support pension funds for retiring officers.
To argue over $13 million in policing contractual agreements seems insignificant at first, but the message a unanimous vote of approval sends to a community is one of confidence in an institution that has received considerable backlash throughout its history. It seems that activists’ requests to defund the police are simply ignored.
As for the cities that have taken measures to decrease their police budgets, only four have reduced their budgets by more than 10 percent: Austin, New York City, Minneapolis and Seattle. There hasn’t been any sort of transformative change within policing for activists who one day envision the abolishing of police departments nationwide.
The history of policing in the United States is based on institutionalized racism and militarization. In her New Yorker essay “The Invention of the Police,” Harvard historian Jill Lepore shows how American policing originated in the early 1700s through “slave patrols” that captured escaped slaves. For Southern slave owners, slave patrolmen were the de facto police. To gain a sense of control over the slave population at the time, these patrols were created and instituted in Southern states until the end of the Civil War, after which they evolved into Southern police departments in the Jim Crow era.
In 1909, August Vollmer was named the first Chief of Police of the Berkeley Police Department. Straight away, he employed what were considered unusual policing tactics at the time. He provided his force with patrol vehicles such as bicycles and cars and was instrumental in the development of the polygraph, being the first police chief to utilize it during investigations. He also created the first police training school in the United States and required that his officers get college degrees. Vollmer earned his nickname as the “Father of American Policing” as his tactics were implemented nationwide.
A veteran of the Spanish-American War, Vollmer believed that the police were fighting a war against criminals and enemies, and his policing methods were predicated on his war experiences. He was keen on the adoption of a “conquest” mindset, where the police were responsible for enforcing and maintaining power over potential threats. The use of vehicles was developed to increase mobility for his officers, mirroring the counterinsurgent tactics Vollmer used while fighting in the Philippines. The creation of police intelligence divisions under Vollmer’s reign allowed him to collate official records on local criminals and keep tabs on them, something that had not previously been required by police departments.
From there, policing became increasingly militarized throughout the 20th century, as Vollmer’s tactics were implemented in departments across the country. In particular, police militarization escalated in the face of the Civil Rights Movement, where officers were armed with military-grade weapons and deployed to “maintain peace and order” over protestors and rioters. The issue was exacerbated in 1990 when President George H.W. Bush signed off on the 1033 Program, which legally requires the Department of Defense to transfer excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement. President Bush signed this program into law intent on fighting the war on drugs. Thus, most if not all of these weapons went to police departments in urban cities. Programs such as the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) only ensured that these weapons reached the departments.
During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump attacked then-candidate Joe Biden for wanting to defund the police. He stated that Biden would “dismantle your police departments” and grouped Biden together with “radical” Democrats who favored defunding the police.
Biden denied these assertions. Rather, he made the decision to speak out against the “Defund the Police” movement. While Biden emphasized the need for criminal justice and policing reform, he chastised the movement and stated that he does not support defunding the police. In a USA Today op-ed piece published last June, Biden reiterated his belief in community policing, stressing the importance of “getting cops out of their cruisers and building relationships with the people and the communities they are there to serve and protect.”
On the “justice” page of Biden’s official campaign website, there is a paragraph dedicated to the need to “reinvigorate community-oriented policing.” The so-called “reinvigoration” comes from a proposed $300 million investment into the aforementioned COPS program by the Biden administration, with the caveat that the additional officers must reflect the diversity of given communities. It describes Biden’s previous work in spearheading the program, which was part of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly referred to as the “Biden Crime Law.” The COPS program was created to help advance community policing across the country through grants and funding. However, Biden’s page also explicitly notes that “the program has never been funded to fulfill the original vision for community policing.”
In fact, as Washington Post reporter Radley Balko writes, the COPS program directly resulted in the militarization of police departments. Congress was happy to spend money on hiring more officers without any real oversight on how the police spent funds. Meanwhile, police departments were actually utilizing the grants from the COPS program to increase the stature of their tactical units and SWAT teams, as well as to purchase pieces of military equipment. Balko cites criminal justice scholar Peter Kraska, who found that law enforcement officials associated community policing with a militarized, zero-tolerance model of policing, and claimed that SWAT teams were integral to their community policing efforts. That is how Joe Biden inadvertently helped fund the militarization of the police in the 1990s.
To have a president as gung-ho for community policing, or any sort of policing for that matter, is disheartening to activists. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Mariame Kaba, an activist whose work focuses on the transformation of the criminal justice system, labels liberal policing reforms as complete failures, including Biden’s plan to distribute $300 million to police departments. As an advocate for the dismantling and eventual abolition of the police state, Kaba argues that, “fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.”
On any given day, headline after headline focuses on a new murder at the hands of the police. Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, was killed during a routine traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, by an officer who accidentally pulled out her gun instead of her taser and fired away. Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Mexican American teenager, was shot and killed in Chicago after raising his hands in accordance with a police officer’s demands, albeit having tossed a firearm away seconds before being killed. It is statistically proven that minorities, particularly victims identifying as black, are disproportionately killed by the police.
And yet there is a cavernous divide between opinions. For every person who supports the Defund the Police movement, there are ten people who condemn it with every bone in their body. Rather than relying on the voices of academics and politicians, all you have to do is scroll through social media and read some of the comments to see just how wide this divide is.
The top comments under this ABC News YouTube video covering the Ma’Khia Bryant shooting praise the police officer, Nicholas Reardon, for saving the life of the woman who was being threatened. “If he hadn’t done what he did, then the victim would have been killed or hurt and the cop would have been blamed for not doing his job” writes one user, receiving over 21,000 likes. Other comments chastise Bryant for her actions. “Fun fact: you’re less likely to get shot by police if you aren’t swinging a knife at others threatening to stab and kill them,” reads another comment with more than 9,700 likes. One comment rewrites the title of the video from “New video shows Columbus police shooting of teenager Ma’Khia Bryant” to “Officer saves a girl from being stabbed after teen stabs one girl.” From one perspective, these comments vilify Bryant and fail to paint an accurate depiction of who she was as a teenager who needed help. To others, it is sad that she was shot, but it was justified because Bryant was actively trying to stab someone with a knife. What are the police supposed to do in that situation? Allow Bryant to kill someone else in front of a police officer?
The rise of social media as a breeding ground for this sort of dialogue is a discussion for another day. What matters is that these sentiments are frequently communicated over platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, often intersecting with posts and comments in support of movements such as Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter. It is a tragic debate to have, to consider the merits of a police officer shooting and killing a 16-year-old black girl. And yet it is a debate many Americans are willing to embrace, which indicates how polarizing a video of a 16-year-old girl being killed by the police can be.
The Minnesota Vikings play their home football games three miles away from the Minneapolis intersection where George Floyd was killed, and ten miles away from where Daunte Wright was killed. In lieu of both killings, their social media team has made multiple posts on Twitter and Instagram focused on social justice, as every American professional sports team has.
On April 12, the Vikings posted a statement on what they described as the “senseless killing of Daunte Wright.” One comment stated that Wright’s killing made it clear that police are severely lacking in proper training. But that comment is sandwiched between two others, one asking the team to condemn the burning and looting of buildings that occurred during the George Floyd protests, and one telling the team to “stay in their lane.”
Nine days later, the team posted a photo reflecting on the impact of George Floyd’s death, both on black Minnesotans and on the nation in general. They made a commitment to reduce socioeconomic disparities, implement educational curriculums on racism and Black history, and advocate for law enforcement and criminal justice reform. The comments? They focused on the “burning down of cities,” the notion that the Vikings shouldn’t be involved with “politics,” and the need for the team’s offensive line to be fixed.
On one side, there are Americans who back the Black Lives Matter and the Defund the Police movements and are mobilizing to protest police brutality and the killing of black lives. On the other side, with substantial support, there are Americans who fundamentally disagree with Black Lives Matter and the protests that have occurred in the past year. According to a recent CBS News poll, nearly half of surveyed Republicans disagreed with the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial, where Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd.
When Sgt. Dalton Price first heard about the Defund the Police movement, he thought it was an “interesting” issue to bring to the table, he tells me. The more he dug into the proposition, the more questions he had about how activists defined “defunding” as opposed to, say, “reallocation.”
“Exactly how much money don’t the police need?” asks Price, with a hint of frustration in his voice. “As time goes on, you start having these conversations with people who say, ‘I’m saying reallocate the money or put it in other places.’ I’m not saying it can or can’t be done, but if you don’t mean ‘defund the police,’ stop saying ‘defund the police.’”
He’s also annoyed by the idea of abolition, the notion that people don’t just want money reallocated from police departments. They want the elimination of the police as an institution. Activists such as Mariame Kaba and Angela Davis make arguments for abolition, stating that it’s too late for police reform. Rather, the only way to stop police violence is to render the police obsolete and reinvest that money into programs that would prevent crime from occurring in the first place. “Educators, organizers, artists, athletes, intellectuals — everyday people — can play a major role in introducing ways of imagining the future that are not tethered to the notion that only the police can be effective guarantors of safety,” writes Davis in Medium.
“It’s a state of euphoria, and I don’t think you can accomplish it,” says Price. And euphoria doesn’t solve anything in the world of policing. “There are some bad people in this world, and I don’t know who’s going to deal with them.” Price makes a point that reflects the thoughts of millions of Americans. Are bad people going to magically disappear if the police are abolished?
“At one point they were going to lay off 125 cops. Community police officers had been out talking to people on the streets, and the attitudes from people were, if you lay off a hundred and twenty-five cops, who’s gonna protect us?”
Officer Andrew Seale echoes these sentiments. “Let’s say that tomorrow, there’s no police,” hypothesizes Seale. “People are still going to be victims of crime. So, what are you gonna do? People are still gonna be shot, they’re gonna be murdered, they’re gonna have things stolen from them.”
That’s not to say that Price and Seale think that policing in the 21st century is perfect. In fact, Price agrees that there are duties police officers should not be responsible for, primarily cases involving mental health disturbances. Officers don’t want to end up in a scenario that commands a tragic outcome. But their job dictates the use of lethal force as needed, such as when lives are being threatened.
“As a police officer, as a trained professional, I need to say that I am not qualified to deal with an emotionally disturbed person,” says Price. “When you bring me there, you bring me and all the tools that I carry. That tool could be verbal judo, my personality, those are all tools.” But police officers carry other tools, tools that automatically militarize the situation. “That also means my mace, my nightstick, my handcuffs, maybe my gun. If you realize that you’re calling a person to a situation that he’s not qualified for, maybe you should stop calling that person.”
Price offers a hypothetical. There’s this couple with a troubled son who’s locked in his own room. He’s been hospitalized in the past, and he’s seeing a social worker. He’s never been violent, and he’s not hurting anyone at that moment. If he were to do something that makes his parents feel threatened, they’d be justified in calling the police. But in this scenario, there’s no potential for violence.
“Then why are the police being called? There’s no reason to summon a police officer, because whatever crisis this young man has, all of a sudden, his bedroom opens and there’s two police officers in uniform,” continues Price, who explains that the presence of police officers in that situation makes the crisis worse for the boy. No matter what the police officers say, all the boy sees is two police officers, and the entire situation takes a turn for the worse.
The problem Price has is that parents or legal guardians don’t have anyone else to call when it comes to mental health situations, especially because 911 is the first number to call with regard to disturbances. Price offers a solution: a local 711 number where parents are connected with a mental health counselor who determines whether the police are needed. “You’re calling 711 because you have an issue, so then you get a social worker, and they ask you ‘can you bring your child in?’ ‘Yes, I can bring them to the hospital.’ Bang, never need a police officer, never becomes a call for service, and the service still gets done” says Price.
Seale describes a situation relatively similar to the Ma’Khia Bryant shooting that occurred a month after our conversation. “There might be a person who’s mentally ill and they have a knife or something, and they’re going around threatening people or something like that,” says Seale. “Now, we can make the argument that an expert in mental health might be better suited to talk that person down, and sure that’s fine. But what do you do about the safety aspect of it?”
Does Seale have a point? If a social worker is tasked with handling a situation that could turn violent in a split-second, how are they supposed to make sure that the patient doesn’t hurt anyone else? Even with the best training in the world, they might not be able to stop someone with mental health needs from acting impulsively and erratically. It would be ideal for the police to de-escalate these situations without anyone getting hurt, and the Columbus Police Department did not afford Ma’Khia Bryant that luxury when Officer Reardon shot her four times in the chest after yelling “Get down.” But as the YouTube users mentioned above argue, did Reardon do his job in protecting the women Bryant was about to carve open with a kitchen knife? Or are those details overshadowed by Bryant’s death?
There are the blatant errors in judgment by police officers that have led to the deaths of people such as George Floyd and Daunte Wright. Derek Chauvin was indisputably wrong for kneeling on Floyd’s neck long enough to be convicted of murder. Kimberly Potter should never have mistaken her gun for a taser, no matter how much distress she was under at that traffic stop.
Price is cognizant of this. He strongly disapproves of officers who abuse their power and misrepresent the overall police force. “If you’re a police officer, you decided that you want to live under a certain standard,” says Price. “You want to enforce the law and follow the law, and if you violate that, you should be punished to the fullest extent. Period, no question about it”
He goes on to explain that he’s careful but honest about how he judges police officers, especially as a 25-year veteran. “If you show me a five-second clip of fight that was already going on, I may say, ‘I want to see more,’” explains Price. However, the five-second clip doesn’t show him the entire situation and where the wrong was done.
“Versus the George Floyd incident. I don’t need to see more video, because what I’m looking for is where the law was violated. So, once I look at that George Floyd video, about ten, twenty seconds in, that’s it.” At this point, he knows the law has been violated and that Chauvin is in the wrong. “The other eight minutes and 20 seconds, I don’t need to see. And I don’t need to see what happened before, because realistically, it doesn’t matter what happened before. You have to call out wrong when you see it,” says Price.
With this, Price falls in line with other police officers who acknowledge that Chauvin committed a crime. The fact that Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified against Chauvin’s use of unnecessary force speaks volumes. Officers often adhere to a “blue wall of silence,” or the police’s version of the mafia’s Omertá, an unwritten code where officers refuse to “snitch” or get their fellow officers in trouble under any circumstance. The loyalty many officers have towards one another discourages them from speaking out against others who are clearly breaking the law.
Arradondo testified that Chauvin’s knee chokehold-tactic was not a part of the Minneapolis department’s training at all, and that Chauvin’s actions directly violated their use-of-force policy. That is as damning of a testimony as Arradondo could have provided for the jury as a police chief.
Price understands all of this. He is also quick to note that he takes issue with a small, minute percentage of police officers representing all police officers and framing them as crooked. “They are what the public sees that represents police departments, and the public will expect them to behave in this manner,” says Price. “There’s 1.2 million police officers in this country. Do you think that’s fair?”
What comes next with regard to policing? That’s the million-dollar question that will shape this country for the foreseeable future. Will activists be successful in their bid to defund, and even abolish the police? Will police departments and politicians push back against these efforts?
Police officers themselves are bearing witness to this radical shift towards a society that wants them completely gone. Kaput. Recently, the New York Post reported that according to NYPD departmental data, more than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers either retired or submitted resignation papers in 2020. 800 officers have already done so in 2021. Whether this trend is attributed to the tide of criticism police officers are being dealing with, or that veteran officers are speeding up their retirements to collect their pensions, police officers in New York City are leaving the force in droves.
Maybe the defunding of the police is occurring on its own.
Where does community policing fit into the narrative of modern-day policing? It arguably slots in right between traditional policing and the Defund the Police movement as an alternative method of policing. Can it fill the canyon-sized void left between these two polar-opposite sides?
It seems paradoxical, the notion of putting more police officers in neighborhoods in order to foster relationships between communities and the police, when people argue that police officers themselves are the root of the problem. It comes down to the functionality of community police officers, in that their sole purpose is to create partnerships and proactively solve public safety problems.
To rebuild these relationships in communities that have been heavily impacted by police brutality can be perceived as an impossibility, considering everything that’s transpired in the last calendar year, let alone in past decades. But what is the United States realistically closer to? The defunding of the police, or the continuation of traditional policing?
Seale believes community policing is a policing method that will help bridge the gap between Defund the Police activists and proponents of traditional policing. He is cognizant that there are people on both sides of the aisle who will never come to the discussion table. “The overall undertones, even in politics, is ‘If you don’t believe what I believe, then I cut you off. I don’t care about anything you have to say, I don’t care nothing about you, I’ve already written you off,” says Seale.
“Community policing is one of those things that changes the game with the community and the police and how well they work together,” continues Seale. “But I think people need to understand that the idea of the community being the police, and the police being the community. It’s all about the partnership.”
Seale decided to become a police officer after attending the aforementioned Explorers program while attending high school in Texas. Today, he’s the one helping facilitate the local Explorers program in Rockford, where he engages in discussion with young adults potentially looking for a career in law enforcement.
One of Seale’s former students in Rockford’s Explorers program was a 16-year-old girl. Last summer, he watched her serve as one of the more outspoken protestors in Rockford during the nationwide George Floyd protests.
“I still picture her as the kid from the program, so to see her out there yelling and screaming at me, it juxtaposed everything. It was just weird seeing someone I’m picturing back in the day, a 16-year-old in the program and how they were, and then you see them today and they’re screaming at you, and it’s just a crazy transition.”
But Seale is quick to note that he harbors no ill will towards the girl, or any of the protestors in general. “Maybe somewhere, officers might have things against protestors. I don’t. Even with her, if I saw her walking down the street, I’d wave to her and stop to talk with her. If she were willing to talk to me, I would talk to her.”